About us

Abalimi Bezekhaya promotes small scale urban farming.  We are a development organization rather than charity, because we partner with active members of the community to aid their efforts in growing and improving their communities.

Our work is based on five core pillars:

• Training and extension services around urban agriculture
• Provision of affordable and accessible agricultural resources such as seeds, seedlings, compost and natural fertilisers
• Infrastructure support, specifically around maintenance of irrigation and soil building
• Market access support to encourage income generation
• Organisational development support

Our garden centers are based Khayelitsha and Nyanga where we support the local communities, with our head office at Airport Industria in Cape Town.

Harvest of Hope is back again

After a three year break in operations, we are excited to share that Harvest of Hope relaunched in September 2022. Originally established in 2008 with the aim of providing market access to farmers who wanted to sell surplus veggies.  HOH started marketing veggies from farmers in the townships long before anybody else was doing it. What started as a humble offering to school communities, grew to a shift in the market and encouraged other organizations to buy vegetables from the townships.  This initial project closed down in 2019 due to various reasons, but was relaunched again in 2022.

The HOH relaunch features one key difference; the initiative is being lead entirely by the farmers themselves, whilst Abalimi will support in a mentoring role. 

Harvest of Hope intends to deliver results just like in the past where over a period of 11 years we sold over R16 million worth of vegetables, of which around R10 million was paid directly to farmers.  Veggies were grown at about 70 different gardens scattered around the townships, annually supporting around 245 farmers and their 1225 dependents.  This was maintained over 11 years, and we believe the Harvest of Hope initiative can help farmers sustain their futures and grow from strength to strength.

Abalimi is providing a mentorship role and some logistical support, however the process is entirely driven by the farmers for the farmers.  All the money that is paid goes directly to the farmers and the aim to provide market access through Harvest of Hope.

For more information about Harvest of Hope, visit their website or Instagram account.

Community Outreach

Abalimi has community garden centres in both Khayelitsha and Nyanga that provide affordable and accessible resources such as seedlings, manure, tools, ferterlizers and pest control, and act as demonstration gardens used for training purposes.

These centres are based in the community and run by people from the local community, thus making them accessible and affordable to our target ‘grassroots’ communities.  Fieldworkers provide ongoing support to the numerous home gardens and community gardens based at schools, clinics and on municipal land.  We also provide support to institutional gardens that are run by schools or ECDs where the primary beneficiary is the organisation.

Our field workers go around to home, community and institutional gardens to provide practical mentoring and support on the ground (extension services) for growing organic veggies in sandy soils in the Cape Flats.   

We partner with local NGOs who have beneficiaries in the townships who require support with food gardens through special projects such as Neighbourhood Old Age Homes (NOAH, Beautiful Gate, Ranyaka and Khayelitsha Social Development Forum (KSDF).